As enterprises accumulate ever-greater amounts of data on their transactions, processes, products, and operations, online analytical processing has become an important part of doing business. The number of tools and techniques addressing analytical processing has grown, enabling data analysts to quickly analyze and navigate through vast and complex collections of data using processing software and platforms. Processing software systems use objects to represent real-world items used during the transaction of business. For example, an object may include logic and/or structured data, and may be used to represent a document, such as a sales order, a purchase order, an invoice, a product, a partner company, or equipment. The underlying structure of the object may be determined based on the requirements of the environment in which the object is to be used. In many instances, objects, such as documents in a document flow, include data that can be used in a variety of ways to facilitate understanding of the data by users/customers of the associated analytical processes. However, such data may be spread among many documents in the document flow, and its extraction and processing may be time-consuming and challenging.
Databases and business objects are highly useful tools allowing users to manage complex relationships between large amounts of different types of data. When data is requested to be read, analyzed, and returned in a de-normalized view from a database, in general a user interface (UI), web service, data export and the like will formulate a use scenario, such as a query, search, or free search having features, to the database. The database can include a large number of instantiated business objects, entities that include attributes and associations with other business objects.
Typically, different data models and business object frameworks are implemented in a complex architecture. For example, an integration of each business model into different user interface (UI) technologies can include complex integrations with differing frameworks. Therefore, systems implemented using the UI technologies and the different business models result in different components and the point-to-point integrations. The point-to-point integrations can result in a high total cost of development (TCD) for the business object framework development, maintenance, and the integration effort for the system. Experiences for application developers can be less than ideal, because each of the different integrations have no harmonized look and feel. Again this can results in a high TCD for the developer as well as any partners and/or customers, because no common concepts, tooling and integrations are in place in the current art. As a result, a developer has to learn point to point integration. In addition, a combination of different integrations may not be possible or may require a significant amount of manual effort.